Up

The Uncola.

— Advertising slogan

In 1919, St. Louis adman Charlie Grigg saw big money in soda pop.

So he quit advertising for sales and joined a beverage company.

An innovative guy, before long he invented two successful soft drinks for the company, "Whistle" and "Howdy."

But it was his third invention that made Grigg's name.

In 1929, Grigg—now heading his own beverage company—introduced "Bib," a name he would change seven years later to "7 Up."

The "up" in 7 Up came from lithium, a mood-enhancing substance used to treat depression in the early 20th century.

Grigg added tons of it to 7 Up, to distinguish it from other lemon and lime pops.

A well-known picker-upper, lithium was a popular ingredient in patent medicines at the time; and doctors would advise depression-sufferers who could afford it to vacation at spas near lithium-rich springs, where they could drink and bathe in the mind-altering waters.

Grigg’s formula was perfect.

His timing was also perfect: 7 Up appeared just two weeks before Black Tuesday, the event that triggered—no pun intended—the Great Depression.

Sales of 7 Up soared.

Consumers believed Grigg's claim that the pop buoyed flagging spirits (7 Up is a "savory, flavory drink with a real wallop," his ads said).

They also liked to use 7 Up as a hangover cure (it "takes the ouch out of grouch," the ads insisted).

Grigg's invention became the third best-selling pop in the world—until the federal government intervened.

In 1948, the feds banned lithium in all foods and beverages, determining it to be a cause of birth defects, kidney failure, and death.

Without lithium, 7 Up's sales tanked.

But in 1968, with the help of ad agency J. Walter Thompson, 7 Up staged a comeback.

JWT tapped into the counter culture, labelling 7 Up the "Uncola" and positioning it in ads as if it had been concocted by The Beatles.

The agency hired designer Milton Glaser—famous for his Bob Dylan poster—to create campaign graphics and rented thousands of billboards alongside America's busiest highways, where college kids would be sure to see them.

JWT also launched a TV campaign that featured a genial Black actor who explained why kola nuts were inferior to lemons and limes.

The ads worked so well, 7 Up's sales skyrocketed. 

The pop reclaimed its rank as the third largest-selling soft drink and at the same time became inextricably linked to America's "rebellious youth."

By the 1990s, however, those youth were in their 50s, and 7 Up became, in the words of one Wall Street analyst, "what old people drink."

Today, the brand has less than 1% market share.

Above: The Seven Ups by Robert Francis James. Oil on fiberboard. 8 x 10 inches.

Monetizing Mania

The grief, trauma, and physical isolation of the last two years have driven Americans to a breaking point.

— President Joe Biden

Marketing guru Mark Schaefer thinks businesses can cash in on Americans' mania.

Mania may be "the biggest marketing megatrend of the decade," he says. "It’s bigger than the metaverse because it impacts almost everybody."

Businesses can monetize mania in any number of ways, Schaefer suggests. They can:

• Offer customers spas, massages, and "stress-relieving activities like yoga, meditation, and running;"
  
  
• Provide them sleep aids, alcohol, comfort food, and games;
  
  
• Offer psychological counseling (both online and in-person);

• Support customers' hobbies (painting, knitting, cooking, woodworking, etc.); and
  
  
• Deliver products and services that capitalize on nostalgia.

"If you think this through," Schaefer says, "the changes being forged by stress and mental health could impact how, when, and where customers shop, how they consume content, and who they trust."

I think Schaefer is onto something. 

The pandemic has brought about a sea change. 

Every day is now a Manic Monday.

In response, I believe, businesses can take steps now to attract and retain crazed customers:

• First, redesign your frustrating telephone tree. Allow customers the option of skipping all announcements and dialing the CEO. Encourage them to leave him verbally abusive messages and offer weekly prizes for the most creative ones.
  
  
• Retrain all customer service reps (CSRs) to impersonate Mr. Rogers. Retain only those whose impersonations are dead on.  
  
  
• Provide cannabis-laced cookies and brownies in your reception areas and waiting rooms. Serve customers only CBD-infused coffee and tea.
  
  
• Imprint punching bags with the faces of your senior executives and place the bags throughout your offices.
  
  
• Send post-purchase surveys that allow only complaints.
  
  
• Instead of tee shirts, give away branded straight jackets.

Mania represents the marketing megatrend of the decade.

How will you cash in on it?

POSTSCRIPT: I don't make light of America's mental health crisis, only marketers' urge to monetize it. Should you be suffering, find a quiet room, grab a cool beverage, and sit down and read Jon Kabat-Zinn's Full Catastrophe Living: Using the Wisdom of Your Body and Mind to Face Stress, Pain, and Illness. 

Soullessness Always Shows

A good bookshop is a genteel black hole.

― Terry Pratchett

Only once did I ever step foot into an Amazon bookshop.

I visited the one in Washington, DC, and fled after five minutes.

The shelves' contents revealed a company without spirit.

Good bookshops, as Terry Pratchett observed, lure customers to dwell—for hours on end. To book-bathe and sip coffee while communing in the presence of genteel minds.

A soulless bookshop, on the other hand, repels customers. 

Its offerings and atmosphere signal that the owners do not read and that they wouldn't know Camus from Kanye.

So it comes as no surprise that Amazon has decided to close its 68 bookshops.

The business lesson here is fundamental.

An offering with no soul is an offering bound to fail.

No amount of slick store décor can disguise an absence of Geist.

How about your business?

Does it have no soul?

Helluva Way to Run a Railroad

This is a helluva way to run a railroad.

— Leonor Loree

When civil engineer Leonor Loree took charge of the dilapidated Kansas City Southern Railroad in 1906, he stood before investors and described the railroad's broken-down operations in detail.

"This is a helluva way to run a railroad," he concluded.

I can now say the same of the online art-supply retailer Jerry's Artarama.

The company recently misdirected a $66 shipment of supplies I ordered.

The shipment was sent to my former address (by default), and when I phoned customer service—within two minutes of placing the online order—I was told Jerry's could do nothing to reroute the package. The package wouldn't ship for days, but, when it did, it would ship to my old address. Like it or not, that's they way the system works. Get over it.

I was on my own to recover the goods, too, I was told. Jerry's was officially out of the loop; and if I involved the company further in the matter, there would be hefty fees billed to me.

I have since located and the misdirected package and it has been returned to Jerry's; but no refund has been issued. I'm out my time and trouble and $66.

Every contact with the company's frontline employees suggests to me that Jerry's corporate culture is toxic.

At Jerry's:

• Everyone clearly is a helpless slave to internal systems, hidebound policies, and an iron-fisted supervisor;
  
  
• Problems must not be acknowledged;
  
  
• Customers—even so-called VIP ones—are annoying, not to be trusted, and always in the wrong.

In the past three years, I have spent several thousand dollars with Jerry's. You'd think someone would know that, in the era of CRM. Perhaps someone does, but doesn't care.

In any case, henceforth I'm a loyal customer of Jerry's competitor, Blick. 

Jerry's is on my s-list.

Forever. 

I plan, as well, to tell fellow artists about my lousy experience with Jerry's at every opportunity.

Helluva way to run a railroad.

POSTSCRIPT: Goodly subscribes to the fairness doctrine, and in that spirit will afford the president of Jerry's Artarama, Mr. Ira Goldstein, his two cents. 

He kindly wrote today in response to the above:

"I am very sorry for the events that occurred that have left you unhappy with Jerry’s handling of your recent order. I assure you that I take all of customers' concerns seriously. 

"I have reached out to our customer service director Steven Gilmore to look into your order and find out where the disconnect was that derailed your shopping experience with us. Steven will reach out after looking into the details.

"Jerry’s tries to set ourselves apart in artist product offerings, our prices and most importantly our service. Sometime things occur not by design and your email will help us to fix what occurred in the future and right this for you to the best of our ability. I would like to thank you, for contacting me will help us make sure this does not occur in the future."

POST POSTSCRIPT: Mr. Steven Gilmore phoned me to apologize for the customer-service failure and suggested that Jerry's computer system sent the package to my former address out of "overzealous fraud protection" and that Jerry's employees could not redirect the shipment once the system decided where it would go. He promised I would receive a refund of my $66.

UPDATE AS OF NOVEMBER 28: Jerry's has refused to refund me the $66. I contacted the company by email to tell them to keep it and buy the CEO a box of cigars.

UPDATE AS OF DECEMBER 14: I shared the post above with famed marketing guru David Meerman Scott, who reacted forthwith: "Customer service should be an opportunity to build fans. Clearly Jerry's is not doing a good job."

UPDATE AS OF DECEMBER 25: I received a full refund from Jerry's. Unsure why, but I have no complaint. Perhaps Mr. Scott's remark sped it along. Looks like there is a Santa Claus!

10 New Rules for Answering Customer Surveys

If you want a booming business, you have to create raving fans.

— Ken Blanchard

Want to turn a raving fan into a raging one?

Send him another goddamn survey.

"What’s the deal with so many companies sending surveys after you interact with them?" David Meerman Scott recently asked. "It is crazy for a company to do this."

I think it's worse than crazy.

I think it's psychopathic.

In their quest to "engage" us, marketing and customer-service managers have so abused the survey, they've turned a valid instrument into a vicious irritant.

It's time for customers to strike back.

Here are the 10 new rules for answering customer surveys:

1. Drop everything and respond to every survey immediately, regardless of the time-investment. Senders will think you're serious. You might even win a prize.

2. Regardless of your name and gender, always identify yourself as "Semolina Pilchard."

3. When asked to describe yourself, always answer "I Am The Walrus."  

4. Answer every Likert scale question in the negative. ("Never," "Very poor," "Not at all important," "Strongly disagree," etc.)

5. For all other types of rating questions, answer by choosing the worst rating. (For example, "Extremely unprofessional," "Extremely dissatisfied," "Not at all helpful," etc.)

6. Regardless of its purpose, answer every multiple-choice question "None of the above" or "Other." When asked to specify "Other," always answer "Everybody's got one."

7. Answer all binary scale questions "No."

8. Regardless of its purpose, answer every open-ended (write-in) question "Man, you should have seen them kicking Edgar Allen Poe." The only exceptions are the two questions below.

9. When ask to supply "Additional comments," always answer "Comments, comments, comments, comments."

10. When asked to suggest improvements, always answer "Send me money, not surveys."

"Each time you contact a customer you should be providing something of value," David Meerman Scott says.

Rule 10 reinforces his sage advice.

So go ahead: apply these rules to your next survey.

You'll love the results.

When the Lobster Goes Bad

 

Above: Facebook ad for The Hill Store 

You gotta wonder why any sane marketer would discount a $1,200 product by 97%.

Maybe the lobster went bad.

Norma’s, a tony Manhattan brunch spot, is famous for its $2,000 omelette—the world's most expensive, according to Guinness World Records. 

Norma's omlette commands that price because it's larded with fresh lobster, and because "playful extravagance is the whole theme of our menu," according to the restaurant's VP of marketing. 

Were Norma's suddenly to cut the omlette's price by 97%, you'd likely suspect the lobster's gone bad.

Why some marketers are so stupid about pricing eludes me. 

Rock-bottom pricing makes no sense for quality brands. Never ever ever.

Quality brands are about value and trust. Value comes not from price, but from the brand's ability to deliver on its promises; and trust comes from the brand's legacy. 

When a brand trumpets a rock-bottom price, it confuses its customers—both prospective and past.

However, with the goal of driving easy sales, misguided marketers will discount, sometimes deeply.

But a 97% discount? Why not a 100% discount? In other words, a free sample. Now you're talking. Who can resist a free sample?

While not every quality brand's position is "playful extravagance," no quality brand's position is "rock bottom." 

Rock bottom only says the lobster's gone bad.

Me and My Stubb's

I'm not a hypochondriac, I'm an alarmist.

— Woody Allen

How many times a day have you decided you've caught the coronavirus? 

In my case it's four, at least.

But I've managed to avoid routine trips to the emergency room thanks to the sage advice of a Detroit-based MD.

Dr. Susan Malinowski published her advice in Medium back in early April, when the pandemic was new and tests nonexistent. 

She had already caught the virus and lost her sense of smell.

"Until we have adequate testing, don’t ignore this simple symptom," the doctor wrote.

"Yes, there are other causes for loss of smell, but take it from someone who’s been there, the loss of smell is profound. 

"Get a jar of chopped garlic and monitor your sense of smell along with temperature every day. If you can’t smell the garlic, even in the absence of other symptoms, quarantine for 14 days and wait for it to return."

I had no garlic at the time, but I did have have a bottle of garlic-laden Stubb's. 

So I unscrewed the cap and took a whiff from the conical bottle first thing every morning—plus any time my inner alarm sounded (again, about four times a day).

Stubb's became my Covid-19 test kit.

Stubb's doesn't need outside marketing advice; but I'll give it, anyway. 

Should sales of BBQ sauce ever decline, Stubb's might take a page from Arm & Hammer, which boosted flagging sales of baking soda with the claim that it kept refrigerators smelling sweet.

Although at-home Covid-19 tests may soon be plentiful, you can't store them in easy reach, alongside the baking soda.

Nor use them to spark up a burger.

The Party's Over

 

That's the great part of capitalism, gales of creative destruction.

— Larry Kudlow

Instead of wringing their hands over the walloping face-to-face has taken, eventpeeps should be celebrating Covid-19 with Larry Kudlow: "creative destruction" has decimated their industry.

And now, after three successive quarters of negative growth, it's time for a sober assessment of where the events industry is heading in 2021 and beyond.

It's heading to oblivion.

Yes, the industry plummeted off a cliff in February, once the organizers of Mobile World Congress called it quits. That event was the first of the big dominoes to topple; the rest of the western world's large confabs quickly followed suit—or wished they had.

But Covid-19 was only a catalyst, accelerating an already-irreversible downward trend. 

As a viable marketing channel, events had peaked before the virus ever left Wuhan, and were inching toward decline. That's for two reasons:

• Exhibitors are done with them. Events are all the things a CMO shuns when choosing a marketing channel. They're expensive, unproductive, unpredictable, unaccountable, unrepeatable, unmeasurable, unsustainable, wasteful and—sad, but true—too much about the salespeople having fun.
  
  
• Attendees, too. Events are all things an attendee shuns when choosing a means to educate and improve herself. They're all of the above—and noisy, to boot.

Eventpeeps predict the channel that's provided their livelihoods will one day rise, phoenixlike, from coronavirus's ashes.

But the hard truth is: it won't. It can't. Covid-19 has clobbered it.

The party's over.

Decade

Goodly is 10 years old.

What began as a meager stab at search engine optimization a decade ago has become a vocation—you might say, a compulsion—of mine.

With nearly 400 thousand readers, Goodly no longer serves as a device for driving website traffic, but as a way of shouting, Hey, I'm still here.

I recently launched Blog, a new venture that's going to consume my time if it's to succeed—as, I hope, it will.

Meanwhile, God willing, Goodly will continue, pandemic or no, recession or no, civil war or no, global warming or no. 

I'm still here.

In the Year 2525

Customer service is the new marketing.

— Derek Sivers

Mind if I make a prediction? 

I last predicted Hillary would win in a landslide; but here's my prediction anyway: 

Before the year 2525, for once a CSR won't blame me for her company's mistake.

Blaming customers for her company's mistakes has become every customer service representative's default response to problems.

I'm unsure when the practice began, and unsure why.

It truly vexes me. 

Maybe I'm in an unwitting member of a customer-rewards program designed by Lex Luthor. Maybe I'm on a shared list of losers. Maybe in a prior life I was Stalin's sous chef and this is payback.

I don't know the reason, I only know it happens to me repeatedly. Just this month:

• A CSR for Cloudburst (a lawn-sprinkler company), when I called to ask why I hadn't heard from the firm, insisted I never mailed back the reply form from its direct mail solicitation. But I did; I remember, because I resented needing a stamp.

• A CSR for Michaels (an art supplies retailer) told me I was a dodo to arrive at its door for a curbside pickup before the company's app advised me to do so. Telling her I don't have the app on my phone earned me an exaggerated eye-roll.

• A CSR for Young Explorers (an e-retailer of toys) said I was to blame for the fact the company shipped a talking laptop to me and billed my grandson's credit card. When I informed the rep that I'm 66 and don't need a talking My First Tablet, I was still blamed for the mistake; and when I said my grandson was 2 and didn't have a credit card, I was blamed once more.

• A CSR for M & T (a bank) told me it was clearly my fault the bank didn't receive my online application for a new checking account; the fact that Russian hackers had hijacked the bank's website a few days before was immaterial. (I immediately hung up and called the three credit bureaus to set up a fraud alert, FYI.)

If indeed customer service is the new marketing, your marketing sucks.

Sorta like my ability to predict.

Who’s Coining All this Lame Marketing Terminology?

Gary Slack provided today's post. He is chief experience officer of Slack and Company, LLC, a leading global b2b marketing strategy and services provider based in Chicago.

It must either be technology vendors or some mysterious cabal laughing up a storm as we compliantly adopt their subpar terms.

Do you ever wonder who coins all the imprecise and often confusing marketing jargon and industry terms we toss around like stationary lemmings every day?

I'm referring to terms like “account-based marketing,” “programmatic advertising,” “native advertising,” “content marketing,” “big data” and more.

A few years ago, at BMA15, the seventh of seven consecutive annual global conferences I organized for the Business Marketing Association, we had Second City actors do a hilarious sketch about a very secretive “Committee on Marketing Terminology,” whose job was to coin such terms and then laugh uproariously when they somehow caught on with their victims—us.

In so many cases, the new terms being promulgated by software vendors, marketing consultants, academics and who knows who else are just new fancy-pants names for existing and well-understood and widely used techniques.

Account-based marketing

For starters, take “account-based marketing.” Marketers in the b2b space have been doing ABM for decades, if not longer. We certainly have been—for virtually all of our 30 years. Better known as “key account marketing” or as “whale hunting” by the politically incorrect among us, ABM simply means sales and marketing working extremely closely together to target and land often very large prospects through individualized efforts.

ABM is the antithesis of mass b2b marketing, where you’re targeting hundreds, thousands, hundreds of thousands or, if your target is small businesses, millions of business buyers—at generally a very low cost per impression. In contrast, a company could spend thousands—even tens of thousand—of dollars via ABM-style targeting of single prospects.

Yes, ABM is account-based, but targeting down to audiences of one or 10 or 20 is the key to the technique. “Account-based marketing,” as a term, is sloppy, imprecise and confusing. “Key account marketing” is much better.

Programmatic advertising

A newbie term within the past five years, “programmatic advertising” is a problematic term because no one really knows what “programmatic” means.

Here again, what’s at the heart of the term—and the capability it describes—is targeting. As in, “targeted messaging.” Of course, because technology is behind it, what is even more definitive is “targeted one-to-one messaging.”

“Programmatic,” in conjunction with the term “advertising,” is a relatively new marketing capability that lets us b2b marketers target messaging to just the 1,952 or 345 or 672 decision-makers and influencers that we want to reach through advertising instead of just, for example, email.

Maybe “programmatic advertising” ought to be called “no-waste advertising.”

Content marketing

Well, you may regret you got this far with me, because my biggest peeve is with this term, for which even Joe Pulizzi, popularizer of the term and founder of the Content Marketing Institute, denies any paternity.

Of course, as with the above capabilities and a few more to follow, we’ve all been doing “content marketing” for years. It’s just that it used to be called “marketing” or “marketing communications.” Putting high-quality, value-drenched, captivating information in front of buying audiences at every major stage of the buy cycle is most definitely nothing new.

Unfortunately, “content marketing” does not conjure up quality. It conjures up, at least for me, an image of just plain stuff ... or stuffing. As in what goes into a sofa, a turkey or even a landfill. Content can be good, bad or indifferent—a thought that led me two years ago to do some coining of my own: “brandfill,” for boring, bland or bad content marketing.

Native advertising

Native advertising is just “whored media,” the replacement term the Second City actors behind the Committee on Marketing Terminology coined in their BMA15 sketch.

More seriously, it’s just a newfangled term for “advertorial,” a long-lived term for advertiser-sponsored material pretending to look, feel and read like independent news content.

Damn, there I go using that word “content” indiscriminately.

Big data

We’ll end today’s rant or diatribe with “big data.”

The Second City players coined a replacement term—“obese data”—and, yes, it got guffaws. In reaction to the term, I actually had another BMA15 speaker give a presentation about “little data.”

Just as “preventative” is not a word (but “preventive” is) and “very” is used way too often as a modifier, why don’t we just call data by its real and best name—“data”?

How new marketing terminology and jargon come to be—first use, spreading to others and then adopted by all of us, no questions asked—is a great puzzle to me. When I figure it out and have a plan to “sunset” the coiner cabal, I’ll let you know.

Ready to Work Two Jobs?

I often encounter folks who've opted, or been forced, to freelance.

A great many share something in common: they don't want to work two jobs.

Unfortunately, that's what you have to do to succeed.

Because it ain't easy to cultivate "1,000 true fans." Else, we'd all do it.

Editor Kevin Kelly first expressed the idea a decade ago:

You can define a "true fan" as anyone willing to send you $100 a year for your product. Provided your cost of goods is low, a freelancer can get by comfortably with only 1,000 true fans.

And the money need not arrive in lump sums; it can trickle in (fans can subscribe, say, at the price of $8.34 a month for 12 months).

However you're paid, the bar to success is low, Kelly says.

"To be a successful creator you don’t need millions. You don’t need millions of dollars or millions of customers, millions of clients or millions of fans. To make a living as a craftsperson, photographer, musician, designer, author, animator, app maker, entrepreneur, or inventor you need only thousands of true fans."

Besides keeping costs low, the challenge freelancers face is difficult enough to put most of them off.

To succeed, you have to cultivate 1,000 solid relationships―both financial ones (no one else can profit from your work) and professional ones (fans must like and trust you).

It's easy to attract 1,000 or more fair-weather fans (just ask Paul Reubens). But you need 1,000 diehards.

And, although digital platforms that enable relationships with diehards abound, nurturing those relationships could kill you.

"The truth is that cultivating a thousand true fans is time consuming, sometimes nerve racking, and not for everyone," Kelly says.

"Done well it can become another full-time job."

Doing the Wrong Thing

Nothing is funnier than confidently 

doing the wrong thing. 

— Adam McKay

Why do so many business leaders get it so very wrong, so very often?

For four reasons, says Dartmouth professor Sydney Finklestein:

• Experience (when the experience doesn't matched the situation)

• Self-interest (often unconscious)

• Pre-judgments (hasty decisions that stick)

• Attachments (undue influences)

Among my clients, I witness operator-induced train wrecks all the time. 

The five red flags are:

• Obsession with sacred-cow marketing tactics

• Fixation on "bright and shiny objects"

• Readiness to heed the advice of charismatic nincompoops 

• Hyper-focus on waste, instead of growth

• Bias for copying competitors and using low-price as strategy

It's easy for an outsider (like me) to spot when experience, self-interest, pre-judgements or attachments are driving decisions; far less so less for an insider.

As people in recovery like to say, "Denial ain't just a river in Egypt."

Denial enables business decisions to feel right, even when they're wrong.

That's because, as Professor Finklestein says, "Decision making is not a rational, step-by-step process. It’s much more emotionally driven."

HAT TIP to Steve Dennis for inspiring this post.

Where Should CMOs Invest in 2017?

How should a CMO invest her budget in 2017?

Forbes asked seven ad agency execs for recommendations. Their answers were:

Video. Video drives brand engagement and can boost conversion rates on landing pages by 80%.

Digital. "Customers in 2017 will be digital; be there," said Craig Cooke, CEO of Rhythm.

Employee engagement. Invest inside, and turn every employee into a sales evangelist.

Social. Social is the most organic way to market your business. But it takes work, so hire someone outside to do it.

Website. A content-rich website improves SEO, boosts traffic, and keeps audiences on your site, rather than some network.

PR. "The art of great storytelling through media isn’t going away," said Nicole Rodrigues, CEO, NRPR Group.

Content. "Content shock" makes quality content today's key differentiator.

To a man with a hammer, everything looks like a nail. Forbes polled only traditional and digital agencies, omitting the experiential. So, I'll add:

Events. Done well, nothing―absolutely nothing―accelerates brands faster. My humble opinion? Move events to the top of your list.

Both Sides Now

CMOs who hope to keep their jobs must use both the left and right sides of their brains, according to Forrester's 2017 Predictions.

Those who can't—the "analytics-only" and the "brand-only" CMOs—will be pink-slipped.

A CMO's right hemisphere "designs experiences to engage customers." Her left "masters technology and analytics to deliver personalized, contextually rich experiences."

“'Whole-brained' CMOs are in the minority—but they will soon be the competency standard for both B2C and B2B companies," the report says.

My Marketing Prediction for 2017

Marketers—including B2B ones—will turn to stunts to grab attention.

The Marketing of Tomorrow

What's ahead for marketing tomorrow?

Writing for Forbes.com, Kimberly Whitler, a professor at the University of Virginia, asked CMOs for their predictions. 

She discovered:

• "B2B influencer marketing" will become all the rage. CMOs will turn to popular business authors, speakers, podcasters, and executives with large followings and pay them to hawk their products.

• CMOs will also begin to rely more on employees to spread brand messages through social, knowing they can speak more effectively than ads. And, because buyers hang out on many social platforms, CMOs will begin to think "multichannel first."

• B2B CMOs will embrace "account-based marketing," but not without a struggle, because it's hard to influence every decision-maker on every buying committee. To that end, CMOs will begin to use a "recommendation engine" like the one used by Netflix.

• Design will become the key brand differentiator, because big data is now just a "commodity." And educational content will become king. Unfortunately, CMOs will produce too much of it for buyers to absorb.

• CMOs will quit focusing on new martech (although thousands of new martech products will flood the marketplace). CMOs will focus instead on cybersecurity. They're spending up to 25% of their budgets on social, and have made their companies targets for cybercriminals.

• 30% of CMOs will be fired next year, because they lack the ability to drive results. Polish that resume!

My 5 All-Time Favorite Books on Marketing

You witness it every day: the fundamentals elude many a marketer's grasp.

But imbibing the fundamentals is fun. And easy.

Just make a pact with yourself to (re)read these five mind-blowing game-changers in the next few months.

You'll thank yourself.

Your boss will thank you, too.

Confessions of an Advertising Man. David Ogilvy's 1963 romp is a blueprint for sound marketing. In keeping with its title, the book begins, "As a child I lived in Lewis Carroll’s house in Guildford. My father, whom I adored, was a Gaelic-speaking highlander, a classical scholar, and a bigoted agnostic. One day he discovered that I had started going to church secretly."

Positioning. Revolutionaries in 1981, Al Ries and Jack Trout were the first marketers to recognize content glut was our biggest challenge. The book opens with the statement, "Today, communication itself is the problem. We have become the world's first overcommunicated society."

Influence. In Orwell's year, 1984, Robert Cialdini mashed business and psychology to create every marketer's playbook. Cialdini has just augmented his classic with a new book, Pre-Suasion. You might read this book, too.

Maximarketing. Stan Rapp and Tom Collins ushered in the age of personalization in 1986. The technology has changed, but the principles they cite haven't. When Maximarketing was published, David Ogilvy said, “Everyone in advertising must read this book.”

New Rules of Marketing and PR. David Meerman Scott blundered onto a path for marketing his employer's products and turned his journey into a 2007 book. Marketing hasn't been the same since. Scott didn't invent content marketing, but he was the first marketer to recognize its primacy. "Put out great content, and you’re great," he said. "Put out crappy, and you’re crappy."

NOTE: I have encountered a sixth ground-breaker that belongs on the list, Experiential Marketing. 

Killer Phrases

Today's post was contributed by Margit Weisgal, author of Show and Sell: 133 Business-Building Ways to Promote Your Trade Show Exhibit. Margit is managing director of DARE and writes for The Baltimore Sun.

Chic Thompson wrote one of my favorite books, What a Great Idea!, about the way creativity is stifled in organizations by people uttering what he calls Killer Phrases.

Imagine, if you will, someone staring you down when you suggest a new way of doing something and, then, saying, “But we’ve always done it this way” or “It’ll never work.”

You drop your head and wish it were possible to sink through the floor and disappear. “Why,” you ask yourself, “did I open my mouth? Why did I even try?”

Change is scary to a lot of people; unfortunately, we face change on a daily basis because we’ve evolving at an unheard of pace with new everything: new technology, new opportunities, and new competitors, all of which seem to loom on the horizon, forcing us to rethink how we function.

We’d far prefer to play it safe and maintain the status quo. But we can’t stay the same. It’s that simple. Moving forward is the only option. And those naysayers, the perpetrators of Killer Phrases, should be left out of any conversation. New ideas should be greeted with delight. Figure out how to make it work. Not every idea is a great idea, but they should all be considered.

Killer Phrases are nothing new. “The negative voice of 'It’ll never work!' has been around a long time," Thompson writes. "In 1899, the Director of US Patent Office declared, 'Everything that can be invented, has been invented!' and tried to close the Office down.”

Business is about connecting with customers, telling a story that resonates with them. With every new decade and every new generation, we have to change. Thompson says the key to innovation is “abandoning the obsolete, the irrelevant, and the programs without promise.”

It's time to kill the Killer Phrases. The next time someone says to you, “What if…,” respond with, “Let me hear it and we’ll see how we can make it work.”

Wouldn’t that be a nice change of pace?

Brevents Face Tight Marketing Budgets

Event producers in the UK on average spend only $10,697 to market a B2B event, according to a new survey by Eventbrite.

That amount is paltry compared to a US producer's average marketing spend, which is 28 times greater.

Brits spend the majority of their marketing money on outbound email. 

They also rely heavily on word-of-mouth to draw attendees, the survey finds.